The Most Noble of All Causes; The Completion of an Arbitrary List

One of the perks of a premium letterboxd subscription is a fully featured Stats page that organises the data from your account in a series of increasingly granular ways, for example you can see your highest rated cinematographer of all time (Jean Rabier) or of a particular year (2016: Albert Maysles) or what film you’re a statistical outlier for, either rating much higher than the average user (Spy Kids 2, 5 Stars) or much lower (1900, .5 Star) or measure your progress against curated lists such as the Top 250 Women Directed Movies (11%) or Top 100 Animation (42%) or just below it, a thing called “Collections”, lists of movies usually in a series (Indiana Jones, 5/5) But sometimes the movies in the collection are connected not in literal series where the events of each movie happen directly before or after the previous (Evil Dead, 3/3), but are connected more thematically, maybe sharing some of the same characters but not logically following from the previous. It was two of these I decided to tackle b/c somehow I had missed the final entry in both series, The Road To and Mr. Hulot.

The Road To Hong Kong

The Road To movies are a loosely connected series of cheaply produced joke delivery vehicles for Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, and I had the 6 Movie Box Set growing up. My mom was suspicious of he sorts of movies and things for kids that were coming out when I was growing up, I think she thought they were alternately incredibly infantilising or way too “inappropriate” so saw a lot of the stuff she saw growing up, and anything sufficiently From The Past was fair game. I can’t really fault her for thinking “It’s Bob Hope and Bing Crosby Doing Jokes, That’s Probably Fine.” It probably would have been better to be a Marx Brothers Kid, but I somehow didn’t see a Marx Bros. movie until a scant few years ago, as an adult. The plot of every Road movie is exactly the same, Bob and Bing are two losers who suddenly have to get someplace exotic, to find buried treasure or put on a big show or whatever. The “Exotic Locale” is universally a soundstage dressed up two grades worse than Gilligan’s Island, but Reality isn’t the point the point is to hear Crosby and Hope talk to each other, trick each other, and do Vaudeville jokes at high speed, increasingly about the fact that they’re in a movie or the cheapness of the set or otherwise breaking the fourth wall, which is a kind of joke that really captivated me as a kid and that I still enjoy.

Eventually a girl shows up, and usually it’s Dorothy Lamour. They go GaGa for her and fight and undermine each other, she tricks them sometimes but ultimately “ends up” with one or both of them ambiguously and usually without it really seeming like her choice, but they all do a number at the end and hold hands and smile. You may be thinking, “That sounds like The Road to El Dorado” that is because the road to el dorado is explicitly a joke about, (sorry, ~ an Homage To ~ ) these movies, and as such carry over a lot of the troubling stuff that you can imagine exists in a vaudeville format from 19401.

It was a surprise to see the Road To movies listed under “Almost Complete” as I had them all on DVD and watched all when I was a kid, but they were all them deceived for there had been forged a seventh Road movie: The Road to Hong Kong, in 1962. A Spy picture with a rocket to the moon2 launched from an underwater secret base by a secret ~third~3 world power the same year as Dr. No but apparently conceived independently from the first Bond movie, a parody already of something I thought Bond originated but must both be pulling from some shared pulp gestalt. Now, none of that seems like it needs to be set in Hong Kong, other than I suppose Hong Kong’s unique place as both The Exotic East and, technically, Britain, so as not likely to trouble the vacuum-boiling Cold War by using it as a setting. There’s an explicit nod to the feelings of the Second World4 when the boys are introduced to the villains of this one, a secret society called The Third Echelon5.

Anyway. The girl in this one is a young Joan Collins which is cool, and Dorothy Lamour shows up for a second and they fully break character and are like “Hey remember all the movies we made” and she says “Yes and everyone else does too that’s why I’m hiding out here” which is pretty funny. The point of these is to hear little funny jokes like that all throughout but not only is this one embarrassed to commit to saying something goofy, not one line is spoken by someone who isn’t white (Peter Sellers shows up in Indian brown face as an incompetent doctor at one point) and while there are actual asian people in the street scenes and backgrounds (sometimes stuff like this all the locals are white people in brown face. I couldn’t spot one extra in brown face, actually, but I wouldn’t take that assessment to the bank and smoke it.) Hong Kong is just a setting for set pieces at the theatre and jokes about rice and fish. They’re so uninterested in the culture of the place they’re not even particularly mean about it, it’s almost impressively dismissive, truly a tourist picture — the world is here for me to dress up in the trappings of and ultimately take home in a picture frame.

Watch Instead: one of the other Road pictures, they’re usually just as bad culturally but at least they got jokes, or Monkey Business.

Trafic

The Monsieur Hulot movies don’t follow a sequential order so when I finished Playtime in 2018 I wasn’t like, “what happens next” b/c I knew what happens next, Hulot finally got to go back home because when he went to go get a job he accidentally destroyed the place. At least that’s my memory of what happened. Monsieur Hulot is I think most easily described as “French Mr. Bean” but that’s not the most accurate description. Yes Hulot is a muddling imposition on the world around him, but he is not an evil chaotic force the way Bean is. Hulot is Here To Help but he doesn’t really understand anything and is so at odds with modernity it’s a handicap. In the Hulot movie I hadn’t seen, Trafic Hulot is a designer of cars. There’s a big car show in Amsterdam, and they have to get a car from France to Amsterdam. This should be pretty easy, Belgium is in the way but it’s all pretty suburban and flat, but of course if you are in a Jacques Tati picture — silent film gags are gonna happen that’re gonna complicate stuff.

Tati directed the picture and also played Hulot, who I seem to remember not talking at all but he does say little things that fade away, the beginning of something, a suggestion of a sentence. A silent film character whose silence is not out of a disability, but simply habit, pleasantly trying to help while accidentally causing a 12 car pileup on the highway everyone walks away from or quickly chasing another man also carrying an empty gas can down the hi-way because he probably knows which way to go and will lead you there. I relate to Hulot b/c most of the hijinks that give him the most trouble happen when none of his company are watching him, wandering into a brand-new situation alone. It seems cars break more frequently when he’s around, his essential nature rotting the gears like a spiritual acid bent on making rousseau proud. I don’t hold any great love for The Country but it is a part of me, and a part that feels fundamentally at odds with the idea of “driving on the hi-way” or “getting there on time”.

The car Hulot designed for the big show is a camper car, and they carry it there in a big truck. One of their team, a Mod Girl, drives around in a yellow sportscar like Lupin6 and has a little dog and at least a few costume changes a scene. She easily drives there and back several times, circling around the truck when it breaks down like a bird around a tortoise. This is a film built on little gags and the camper car delivers, with hidden gates and modern conveniences like hidden seats in the bumper, a grill7 in the radiator, like that. A car so purpose built for one thing that it would be completely impossible to mass produce or repair at a service station. A car you could take camping, yes, but not really to the supermarket. The Hulot bit works on a system of ironic superimposition, a priest kneels in as if in prayer in front of his engine, a car supposedly for the outdoors has to be delicately transported by truck, a crowd of people still need to carry umbrellas to make the great trek across the vast parking lot to their cars in the rain. All told in really gently composed images in quiet colours. Nothing in this movie is screamed, or demanded. You can draw your own conclusions about whether or not cars are “necessary”, this movie seems to say, but they certainly are here to stay.

Mr. Hulot, unfortunately, was not, as this is the last of these pictures. And it’s a shame more movies aren’t like this, because when I watch them I get, sure, bored a little, but mostly I feel the way I think you’re supposed to feel sitting in the park on a sunny day. And I really recommend that.

Pair with: Good Morning

Originally posted 02/jul/23 to substack.

  1. I’m not sure you can do a Road movie without it coming out at least a little racist, and you certainly couldn’t do it ten minutes into the new millennium. ↩︎

  2. 7 years before Apollo 11 ↩︎

  3. and they were all of them decieved for there had been forged a — oh wait I already did that joke ↩︎

  4. The wikipedia page about the different numbered “worlds” is a riot. It’s got nothing to do with economic acuity! It’s a sides thing! ↩︎

  5. a bunch of white people in jumpsuits with bullseye patches above the hearts, explicitly NOT Russia or America, but a third thing. The Third Echelon, a society of rich genius weirdos who’ve been secretly controlling things this whole time from hidden bases, hey wait a minute I gotta go ring the antisemitism bell oh dear it’s a gong in this one that plays the oriental riff somehow ↩︎

  6. Lupin the III  ↩︎

  7. By which I mean a barbeque grill ↩︎

Essay